28 February 2013

Review: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

The book is, as the title says, Stephen King writing about writing. It's separated into three parts: a mini-memoir that tells a bit about his life and how he came to be the person he is (with details of how certain parts of his life dictated his stories), a larger section about writing itself, and then a recap of his recovery of being hit by a van in the late 1990s.

This, surprisingly, was my first Stephen King book. All this time, I've never actually read King, and I can see why he's so popular from this alone. The guy knows how to turn a phrase, plain and simple. What's interesting is how matter-of-fact his advice is and, more to the point, how he's up front that writing may not be for everybody and that you probably can't turn a bad writer into something a bad writer is not.

(Yes, I still want to write. More than before, in fact.)

Either way, I absolutely devoured all 220 pages of this over the course of a few hours one night, and I'm immensely glad I did. It made me appreciate Stephen King the author that much more, made me respect the craft of writing a lot more, and perhaps inspired me to consider giving writing another go.